Speculum of the Other Woman * Luce Irigaray on Deconstructing Phallogocentrism through Sexual Difference

In Espéculo de la otra mujer (Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974), Luce Irigaray mounts a fierce deconstructive challenge to the male-dominated symbolic order, specifically targeting Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as complicit in reducing femininity to a lack, an absence, or a mirror of masculine desire. In a gesture both theoretical and poetic, Irigaray rewrites the philosophical and psychoanalytic canon—from Plato to Freud—to expose how woman has been excluded from discourse not merely by omission but by structural necessity. Her use of the speculum, a gynecological instrument, is a counterpoint to Lacan’s mirror: where the mirror reflects a (masculine) imaginary unity, the speculum reveals interiority, multiplicity, and opacity—a metaphor for a female sexual difference that escapes the phallic economy of the visible and the linear. Irigaray’s core claim is that the Western symbolic order is phallogocentric—it privileges the phallus as the signifier of all meaning, and logocentrism as a logic rooted in singularity, hierarchy, and stability. In this order, woman functions as man’s other—his mirror, his lack, his negation. But for Irigaray, woman is not the absence of man, but a subject of a different sexual economy, one defined not by the singular, vertical model of masculine desire but by a horizontal, multiple, fluid sexuality. Her notion of "mimicry"—where women may repeat the forms of patriarchal discourse in order to subvert them from within—echoes Derridean strategies of deconstruction but insists on embodiment and sexual specificity. While often accused of essentialism, Irigaray reframes essence as a political and strategic move to recover a feminine imaginary that has been silenced. Her writing style itself—fragmented, poetic, recursive—performs the disruption she theorizes. The "other woman" of the title is not merely the one repressed in history, but the possibility of becoming otherwise, of thinking a symbolic order based on two subjects, not one. Her later work deepens this project into an ethics and politics of sexual difference, but Speculum remains her foundational call to reimagine language, subjectivity, and desire beyond the mirror of man.

écriture féminine, difference, psychoanalysis, phallogocentrism, mirror stage, symbolic order, maternal semiotics, sexual economy, Freud, Lacan, feminine subjectivity, mimicry, essentialism, Spéculum